Making Bubble

Jun 5, 2014

##tl;dr

I worked on chat/photo sharing app called Bubble
with 4 others. We won the runner-up for
judge’s choice award in [University of Washington’s
HCDE Capstone & Research Showcase].

I worked with 4 masters students from UW’s HCD program to build a photo sharing
chat app with a shocking twist. The twist is that the app does not need
internet connection to work. The app is called Bubble.

We started working together in January 2014. We began
with brainstorming what kind of thing we wanted
to work with. We literally could not gauge what each
of us were interested in. So we threw together a dozen
something ideas and we narrowed down to a vague
location check-in app. The idea didn’t stop evolving there. We continued to carve
and morph the idea. Eventually the app turned out to be
something completely unexpected.

Bubble is a chat/photo sharing app that doesn’t
rely on internet connection.

Back in 2009 when I used to commute to my work to Merrill Lynch
in Toronto, I felt incredibly bored in the subway.
I had a old school flip phone, so I couldn’t do much,
but I had unlimited text and I would text a lot.
But in the subway without any connection, I was left
doing nothing. There and then, I was thinking to myself
how awesome it would be to still be able to chat
with others without having signal. I thought of
some sort of mesh network then. Decentralized, ad-hoc
networks that could be created anywhere. I also
imagined a world where companies like Rogers and Bell
were irrelevant forces in telecommunication. So this
idea of complete decentralized network captured
my wild imaginations.

Fast forward to 2014, I learned that iOS has the
precise capability to do this. I didn’t really let
my team know, but it was an amazing feeling. I was
finally working on something that I only dreamed of
only a few years ago. And this app I was working on
wasn’t just for chat, it could also send photos. The
idea was infatuating. The app was gold.

I will continue to work on the app to see it in the AppStore.
I can’t wait for that moment to come.